If you’ve got an M1 Mac you might have noticed that when you run Xcode in native Apple Silicon mode, when building for the simulator it’ll use the arm64 ARCH. This is good, except if you’ve got a lot of legacy dependencies that haven’t been updated to support XCFrameworks. Most binary dependencies out there still assume SDK = iphonesimulator means ARCH = x86_64, which will result in linker errors.

One simple fix is to simply run Xcode in Rosetta. This will make it act just like you’re still on an Intel Mac, and the Simulator will build for x86_64. However doing this means you miss out on some of that legendary Apple Silicon compile performance.

To workaround this, you can basically force your project to cross-compile when using the iphonesimulator SDK to the x86_64 ARCH.

FINAL FANTASY XIV is an MMORPG for Windows, macOS, and PlayStation. The Mac version is essentially an identical build of the Windows version, except it runs in a customised version of Wine. The launcher / patcher for FFXIV is pretty famously disliked, and for Windows users there’s a very good custom one, but unfortunately it doesn’t work for Mac. So I made my own.

One of the more interesting challenges in doing so was dealing with how the FFXIV Launcher passes arguments between the launcher and the main game executable. In this post, I’ll do a deep dive into my journey of discovery to reimplement this logic in Swift.

I bought a HomePod. Here are my impressions.

It’s now been almost exactly one year since Apple Music was announced, so I thought I’d give a bit of a retrospective of that time.

I inadvertently kicked up a big stink two months ago by pointing out how slow Swift was, which was version 1.1 at the time. Apple has since responded with a new beta version of Xcode which includes a shiny new version of Swift, version 1.2. Since it promised to:

… produce binaries that run considerably faster, and new optimizations deliver even better Release build performance.

I thought it would be prudent to re-run my tests and see just how much Swift has improved, if at all.